1960s Interviews With Buckminster Fuller About His Life, Animated

Still one of my fondest memories was spending a weekend at a Harvard Science Center symposium with Bucky, in my early twenties.

Buckminster Fuller: 30th Anniversary of his death but his vision inspries today

"Buckminster Fuller died thirty years ago today - July 1, 1983, but his vision of creating “a world that works for everyone” is more vital and needed now than ever. At the moment of his passing, I was sitting in a movie theater watching the just-released War Games, named after the military plans for global annihilation that Bucky’s “World Game” was designed to counter. The object of war games is to destroy and kill. “World Game,” on the other hand, is about focusing our current resources and knowhow on livingry rather than weaponry.

And although Marshall McLuhan called Bucky “the 20th Century Leonardo da Vinci,” even thirty years after his death, we are, unfortunately, no closer to that vision than we were decades ago. In fact, we might just be farther from it, and Buckminster Fuller’s life and ideas are more obscure than when he was walking the planet he named Spaceship Earth delivering 150 “thinking out loud” lectures per year. In every one of those presentations, Bucky reminded his audiences,
A short explanation from Bucky himself.
Buckminster Fuller's Vision & Wisdom, Brief Exploration

"For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful."

Although I wrote two books about Bucky (Buckminster Fuller’s Universe 1988, A Fuller View 2012), there has been no best-selling book about Bucky, and few publishers are interested in more books about his wisdom and practical solutions to all humankind’s problems. I know this because I’ve been pitching these books for thirty plus years.

And, in an era when we have feature films about some fairly obscure performers, athletes and other unique individuals, there has yet to be a feature film about Bucky’s amazing life. Here is a man who

Was granted 25 U.S. patents.
Wrote 28 published books and thousands of articles.
Received 47 honorary doctorates.
Was presented with hundreds of major awards.
Circled the globe 57 times working on projects and lecturing.
Presented an average of 150 "thinking out loud" sessions per year.
Demonstrated and documented the importance of the "little individual" in the grand scheme of human evolution.

Still, he has yet to be fully recognized and appreciated. More important, the sage wisdom he offers for surviving and thriving both as individuals and as a species is largely relegated to a very limited population.

Bucky was one of the first people (perhaps the first person) to live consciously as a global citizen. He was also one of the first (if not the first) environmentalists, and he lived his life as a Bodhisattva. His mission was twofold and quite clear.

1) To demonstrate and document what one individual could achieve that could not be accomplished by any institution or organization no matter how affluent or powerful.
(2) To advocate and work for the success of all life on the planet he named Spaceship Earth using his Comprehensive, Anticipatory Design Science.

And he lived that mission in a disciplined manner for most of his adult life; creating a 56-Year Experiment to demonstrate and document what one individual can achieve on behalf of all sentient beings. Walking that path, Bucky was able to teach by example -- showing us through his accomplishments and seeming failures that each of us possess tremendous gifts that we can contribute to others and help create “a world that works for everyone.” He also proved that a person could have a satisfying, enjoyable life while making his or her unique contribution.

Today, more than ever, we need conscious, awake, participating global citizens, and we are fortunate that we don’t have to figure out how to become such citizens on our own. Bucky’s life serves as a template for anyone who wants to fully participate and make the most difference with the least amount of effort. We can solve everything from poverty to war to global warming if we will just consider the wisdom of our elders, and in this case the global elder R. Buckminster Fuller.

May we each quickly discover our true path and contribution just as Buckminster Fuller was able to do."

http://www.examiner.com/article/buckminster-fuller-30th-anniversary-of-his-death-but-his-vision-inspries-today

Still, one of my greatest experiences in life was attending a weekend symposium with Bucky at the Harvard Science Center, back in 1976 or 1977.

9 Chains (Buckminster Fuller in Philadelphia)

"9 Chains (Buckminster Fuller in Philadelphia) is a film with live music directed and composed by Gene Coleman with cinematography and editing by Nick Lerman. This work will have its premiere on April 28th, 2012 at International House Philadelphia, with subsequent presentations in the USA and Europe later this year and in 2013. We have had considerable success with support for this project (see below) and now we turn to you to help us fully realize our goal! We need to raise an additional $8,000 to cover the final film production costs, plus travel and accommodations costs for our international guest musicians.
Buckminster Fuller was an inventor, architect and "futurist" who made a very large impact on American culture and technology in the 20th century. The first in a series of works by Gene Coleman about Fuller, “9 Chains” explores his presence in the city of Philadelphia between 1973-1980. Moving between documentary style presentation of the facts and pure abstraction, this work focuses on two projects Fuller worked on while in Philadelphia: the lecture series "Everything I Know" and the development of the World Game Institute. In both cases, Coleman uses the concepts behind these endeavors to create a work that moves fluidly from documentary to abstraction, weaving together the past, present and future."

You can contribute to the Kickstarter project here.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER segment on CBS Sunday Morning show

Attending a weekend symposium with Bucky at the Harvard Science Center when I was 20 or 21, is still one of my life's highlights.

The Crazy Ones

Narrated by Steve Jobs in 1997. Never aired. R.I.P.

CHANGE THE WORLD. DROP OUT OF SCHOOL

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PEOPLE | When you’re super smart and want to learn – or simply don’t fit the mold – what other choice do you have? Some of the world’s greatest creative leaders didn’t have the patience to earn their degree. They dropped out, found a way to create the type of education they needed. And changed our world.

School’s not for everyone. All that linear thinking and standardized examination. Looking at the article “8 famous Harvard drop outs not named Gates or Zuckerberg”, you see an impressive list of people who just didn’t fit in, and yet made it somehow. On their own, or with some help.

Edwin Land, co-founder of Polaroid, dropped out to focus on research. In his lifetime he had registered than 500 patents and introduced the world to instant photography. Then there’s Buckminster Fuller, certainly one of the geniuses of the 20th century. He dropped out, went back, got bored and dropped out again. And went on to invent the geodesic dome.

Interestingly enough, once they’d proven themselves to the world, many of these dropouts later received honorary degrees. Not to bash Harvard, but it’s as if they wanted to claim credit retroactively for creating these innovative souls.

It’s tempting to think of what Bucky and Bill and Edwin would have been able to achieve had their education better suited their needs. Perhaps a single institution wasn’t enough – or maybe the concept “institution” is all wrong, and these famous dropouts had to drop out in order to find the various bits and pieces of education and inspiration and experimentation they needed to achieve that gut feeling we call “vision”.

Dropping out is nothing new. In fact, it seems like a good old tradition in some worlds. Back in 1962, TIME magazine’s list of famous dropouts included astronauts Scott Carpenter and John Glenn, President John F Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Frost, Nobel Prize in Literature winner, William Faulkner…

If that’s the company dropouts are keeping, count me in!

“College psychiatrists by no means disapprove of all dropouts,” the 1962 Time article says. “If dropouts lack ‘motivation,’ it may be a healthy reaction against too many rules and goals that—for them—are momentarily false.” And perhaps dropping out actually provided the motivation needed to look elsewhere for a satisfactory learning experience, and the chance to create something no one every imagined possible.

Image: Buckminster Fuller stamp issued by the US Post Office

Author: Claire Taylor
Date: September 16th, 2011

Read the article and find interesting links here.

An hour with Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car lives again

Architect Norman Foster recreates Bucky's Dymaxion car from the 1930's.

Lord Foster's Dymaxion Car from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.

"What inspired you to recreate Bucky’s famous Dymaxion Car?

Bucky is never far from my thoughts. We collaborated on projects for the last twelve years of his life. When I was awarded the Royal Guild Gold medal in London, he gave the talk. At that point we had decided to do houses for each other. So he came over and we talked about the project. He gave the talk and then he left for America, off to see his terminally ill wife, Ann, in the hospital. On arrival, he had a fatal heart attack at her bedside and she died thirty six hours later. Curiously, on that trip to England, he said to me, “You know, Norman, anytime, I can pull the plug.” I guess that’s when he pulled the plug. He got there and realized that his wife wasn’t going to recover."

Click the title bar to read the full interview with Norman Foster

Bucky Fuller back!

Image via Wikipedia

I finally found another online source for the incredible 42 hours of video left to us when Buckminster Fuller was asked to tell us "Everything I Know". I'd linked to these videos on another host for years, but they were eventually taken down. I'm so excited that they're back!

One of my real lifetime highlights was attending a weekend symposium with Bucky at the Harvard Science Center back in the late 70's, when I was in my early 20s. I'd already read just about everything he'd ever written and thought that I was going to meet the 'mind of the planet'. I came away learning that I'd met the 'heart of the planet'. (Some of my earlier thoughts can be found in the essay 'Heroes Still' linked to the right).

I realize that it's a major commitment of time and mental energy to watch all of these videos...and it may take awhile for some to become familiar with his New England accent and self-created vocabulary. It's worth it. Think of it as a year-long course (just watch an hour a week) that will greatly expand your knowledge and view of how the world works. He was truly a 20th Century Renaissance man, and we've been given a tremendous gift by the preservation of these video records.

Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, 62, Dies

"Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who helped discover buckyballs, the soccer ball-shaped form of carbon, and championed the field of nanotechnology, has died at the age of 62.
Smalley, who had battled cancer, died Friday at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University said.

'We will miss Rick's brilliance, commitment, energy, enthusiasm and humanity,' Rice President David Leebron said.

He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with fellow Rice chemist Robert Curl and British chemist Sir Harold Kroto for the discovery of the new form of carbon, which they dubbed buckminsterfullerene - buckyballs for short - because of its resemblance to the geodesic domes designed by Buckminster Fuller."

See my link at left to 'Everything I Know' and Buckminster Fuller. Also, 'Heroes Still', listed under the Essays section, also on the left.

Heroes still

Ours is not a time that rests easy with the idea of having heroes, except perhaps in the aggregate, as in 'the American soldier' or in the absurd, as with today's luminescent celebrity. Perhaps this is due in large measure because we know too much about individuals today -- or think we do. Clay feet seem to support the most magnificent bronze statues, wobbling under the strain and fissuring in advance of the inevitable collapse.

But that's as it should be, for none of those bronzes ever captured a true, flawed human being to begin with. At best, they represented a moment in time or an expression of the supposed pinnacle of a person's achievement (raising the flag on Iwo Jima or, for another generation and at a further remove from non-cinematic reality, Rocky Balboa) rather than the inescapable shortcomings and limitations which add the true piquancy to the heroic expressions of our species.

As I write this it's the 35th anniversary of the founding of Tranquility Base...the landing of the Eagle....Man's first known steps upon another world (with the great age of the Earth, the ever lengthening estimates of our species' age and the miniscule possibilities of artifact preservation, I remain open to the possibility that we've been this way before). Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins -- along with the other pioneers of space exploration -- certainly stand in my personal pantheon of heroic players. In the heat of the space race with the Soviet Union, there were many unknowns facing NASA, and these three explorers in particular. The courage that it took to ride to the Moon's surface in a tissue-thin spacecraft, land on a 'surface' that might engulf one's conveyance beneath 12 feet of 'moon dust' (still an unknown factor, seriously discussed at the time) and leave those footprint impressions while jogging through an airless void, all the time knowing that a small, relatively untested rocket engine had to fire perfectly the first time, was only matched by a similar courage faced by Collins, alone and locked in orbit around a satellite a quarter-million miles from home.

I was 13 years old on that night, locked in a bodycast from recent surgery, and perhaps never as excited before or since. Those first grainy images were some of the most spectacular sights ever witnessed by the world-at-large. I had my Saturn V model -- which I had constructed in the days immediately prior to the landing -- at my bedside, ready to serve should any of the adults present require my instruction in the mission particulars of staging or Lunar Module extraction (although my Saturn V had suffered the near-fatal accident of crashing to the floor at the paws of my cat Guru, only days before). I felt such pride in being part of the human family that night...and nothing seemed beyond reach at that point. When Armstrong started reading the message on the plaque affixed to the leg of the lander, I think we all felt a kinship that's rarely experienced except in extremis, such as immediately following September 11th:

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969 A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

Another commemoration took place this month that bears on a personal exemplar. The U.S. Postal Service released a stamp on July 12th (his birthday) honoring the life and contribution of R. Buckminster Fuller, or Bucky, as he was affectionately known to the 'Me' generation of the 60's and 70's. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Fuller's patent for the geodesic dome. Although my philatelic interest has been quite limited thus far in life, this was a first-day-of-issue stamp that was a must.

Fuller was a true renaissance man. Designer, inventer, mathematician, poet, architect, engineer, cosmologist and 'comprehensivist'. Through his 'World Game', which inventoried all of the renewable, sustainable resources of 'Spaceship Earth' (a term he coined), he determined that if there was the political will:

“For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the ‘more with less’ technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.”

After reading many of his published works, and being inspired by his personal story (the following paragraph is taken from Who Is Buckminster Fuller? on the Buckminster Fuller Institute website), I came to think of him as the 'mind of the planet':

In 1927, at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller stood on the shores of Lake Michigan, prepared to throw himself into the freezing waters. His first child had died. He was bankrupt, discredited and jobless, and he had a wife and new-born daughter. On the verge of suicide, it suddenly struck him that his life belonged, not to himself, but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.” Over the next fifty-four years, he proved, time and again, that his most controversial ideas were practical and workable.

In the late '70s I had the great pleasure of spending the better part of 2 days with him at a symposium he held at the Harvard Science Center in Cambridge. My assessment of him changed a bit after that experience, as I came to additionally regard him as the 'heart of the planet'. Already in his 80s, he exuded a personal power and energy that was startling. His pixyish demeanor was magnified by coke-bottle lenses, which made readily apparent the twinkle in his eyes as he took pity on us every few hours and allowed us a break from his rapid-fire speech.

I remember his emphasis on the importance of making 'mistakes', as that's where real learning occurs (echoing perhaps Edison's quote about his supposed failures prior to creating a sustainable, long-lasting lightbulb, "We now know a thousand ways not to build a lightbulb"). Rarely is the achievement of success a straight line, Fuller averred, but more like a sailboat which tacks around an approximate course...first this way, then with a slight correction that way. It's often during those slight detours that the most important insights and discoveries manifest.

Earlier in his life Fuller ceased speaking for almost 2 years, the self-imposed moritorium enacted until he could reach a state of mind where he would be able to communicate exactly what he meant. When he did begin to verbalize again, it was with a very idiosyncratic -- but very precise -- vocabulary of self-created terms. He more than made up for his silence over the remaining course of his life...delivering thousands of lectures as he, by his own calculation, encircled the globe at least 57 times. His greatest speaking engagement took place in 1975 however, when he was asked to submit to a videotaping. Basically, the ground-rules where that he should extemporaneously 'think out loud', not repeat himself, and share everything he thought important that he had learned in his life. Forty-two hours later he completed the task! We now have access to that extraordinary gift, thanks to the Fuller Institute, free-of-charge through the Internet. Entitled Everything I Know, it's his final gift to all of his fellow travelers on Spaceship Earth, and well worth multiple viewings (I strongly suggest accessing it in video, rather than just audio or text, as he makes use of a number of visual aids, especially when delving into his treatise on Synergetics and geometry).

It's a challenge at times to set aside cynicism and acknowledge that we can still have heroes, although neither the Apollo astronauts nor Bucky Fuller ever comfortably assumed that mantle (Armstrong withdrew almost entirely from public attention; Aldrin suffered a classic 'nervous breakdown' and retreated for a time to alchoholism largely because of the adulation; Collins went on to head the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, but the light of public fame never shown as brightly on him, as he did not walk on the Moon; and Fuller would never accept the moniker of 'genius', always stating that he was just an average man who placed himself in service to 'Universe').

These are a few of the individuals who did inspire me however, and a little hero-worship never hurt anyone .